I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.

Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been